When I was a financial analyst, a big part of my job was building financial models to project what the returns would be for a hotel that we were building. These models were quite sophisticated and included many variables to account for the perceived future economic conditions as well as our history in running similar hotels. After going through several cycles of building and operating, I discovered one thing in every model that I built. They were all wrong! None of the actual results were what the financial models projected. Some were better and some were worse.
Don’t get me wrong, I was very good at building these models. The problem was not with these models in particular, but with modeling in general. The fact is that every model is based on assumptions about the world. A model is merely a representation of something. Since no model can account for every variable, the model will always have differences of some magnitude to reality.
How Does This Relate to Time Management?
You maybe wondering by now how this relates to improving your time management skills.
Mental Model definition from wikipedia, Jay Wright Forrester defined general mental models as: “The image of the world around us, which we carry in our head, is just a model. Nobody in his head imagines all the world, government or country. He has only selected concepts, and relationships between them, and uses those to represent the real system.”
What if the image of the world that you have in your head has some flaws in it? Just like my financial models didn’t accurately account for all of the variables, it is likely that your mental model has some gaps in it as well.
As an example, one of the assumptions that I always made about my schedule in the past was that I had to have a due date for every single task. I held this assumption in high regard for years until I came to realize that I was creating unnecessary stress on my schedule by putting due dates to every task. Sure, most projects have deadlines; however, individual tasks usually do not. To illustrate this point, I have to complete 40 hours of Continuing Professional Education by the end of June to maintain my CPA license. However, one of my tasks is to order the courses to complete this project on time. I have actually had almost a year to do this. I could have given the task of ordering the courses a due date of the end of June; however, that would have given me no time to complete the work. On the other hand, I could have artificially set an earlier due date, but I would have known mentally that I REALLY had until the end of June. Now that I know this assumption was not completely valid, I can replace it with a better one.
What’s the Point
The point of this article is to help you realize that the images you carry in your head about the world around you have gaps. All of us have gaps in our mental model. Once you recognize this fact, you will be better equipped to look for better variables to use in your mental modeling and less likely to hold onto concepts that are inaccurate. It’s okay that we don’t know everything about the world around us. In fact, that’s one of the things about life that makes living so enjoyable. Knowing that you can only represent a small portion of the world in your mental model is actually quite exhilarating.
Take a few moments to think about some of the things you think you know about time management and challenge yourself to determine how well they represent the world around you.
The hour glass is a powerful metaphor for time because it shows the finite nature of our lives. Think of the top as our future, the neck as our present, and the bottom as our past. When we start to see more sand at the bottom than the top, the decisions we make about today suddenly seem much more important. We develop a sense of urgency to accomplish things that we didn’t have before.